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Yes, it would give a longer battery life. Yes, it has one, but it's not the default, since it flickers.

Just to avoid any possible confusion, there is a "dynpm" (dynamic power management) option which is what I think you are talking about here. That is not actually a profile, but rather an alternative to the (fixed) power profiles.

There is an "auto" profile but it only switches power levels when the display is blanked due to inactivity.

Here are the relevent bits from the RadeonFeature page :

The "dynpm" method dynamically changes the clocks based on the number of pending fences, so performance is ramped up when running GPU intensive apps, and ramped down when the GPU is idle. The reclocking is attemped during vertical blanking periods, but due to the timing of the reclocking functions, doesn't not always complete in the blanking period, which can lead to flicker in the display. Due to this, dynpm only works when a single head is active.

The "profile" method exposes five profiles that can be selected from:
1."default"
2."auto"
3."low"
4."mid"
5."high"

Select the profile by echoing the selected profile to /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile.
•"default" uses the default clocks and does not change the power state. This is the default behavior.
•"auto" selects between "mid" and "high" power states based on the whether the system is on battery power or not. The "low" power state are selected when the monitors are in the dpms off state.

So the improvement of auto In dynpm will improve battery. Are there other features in development that will extend battery life and allow me to give Catalyst the boot?

As you can guess, "low" power profile gives the best battery life. At the cost of GPU being slower of course. It's usually more than enough to cope with desktop effects but you will be unhappy if playing some demanding 3D game with low profile forced (FPS seriously drops). However it's really nice for battery life and reduced heat.

As for me I ended up making few scripts toggling profiles. Because... because automatic management isn't in good shape at all. For example, auto and dynpm only cycles between "mid" and "high" states on my GPU. And GPU could be quite power hungry at mid state (for my GPU mid is 4x higher clock than low!)